When Jörg Haider, the leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, joined the country’s coalition government in 2000, the res­ponse from the rest of the European Union was swift. Every other member state agreed to introduce diplomatic sanctions against Austria. Our then foreign secretary, Robin Cook, expressed “deep distaste” at Haider’s rise to power.

Fourteen years later, will Foreign Secretary William Hague express “deep distaste” if, as the polls suggest, Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is declared prime minister of nuclear-armed India after 12 May? Will the EU have the guts to downgrade diplomatic ties with the world’s biggest democracy?

Of course not, even though Modi makes the late Haider look like a muesli-eating, sandal-wearing liberal. If we’re going to make analogies with European leaders, Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat since 2001, is more in the mould of Milosevic than Haider.

Modi, who is 63, is a card-carrying member of the far-right, Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS); he started volunteering for the group at the age of eight and became a full-time pracharak (pro­pagandist) for it at the age of 20. “The RSS is a secretive, militaristic, masculine cult; a distinct Indian form of fascism that was directly inspired by Italian Fascist youth movements,” Professor Chetan Bhatt, director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the LSE, tells me. “Its founders greatly admired Hitler and Mussolini.” In Modi’s Gujarat, Adolf Hitler is glorified in secondary-school textbooks.

As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi turned a blind eye to – indeed, many would argue, even incited – a horrific wave of violence against Gujarat’s Muslim-minority population in February 2002, after a fire on a train which killed 59 passengers, most of them Hindu pilgrims, and which Modi blamed on “terrorists”. It is estimated that as many as 2,000 people were killed in the anti-Muslim pogroms that followed, and tens of thousands lost their homes.

A chilling report published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in April 2002 documented how the orgy of killing, burning, raping and looting had been “actively supported by state government officials”. It spoke of how a pregnant Muslim teenager had had her womb “cut open with a sharp weapon . . . the unborn baby was taken out and both mother and the child were burnt dead”. Several witnesses were told by police: “We have no orders to save you.”

As a result, India’s Supreme Court described Modi as a “modern-day Nero”, fiddling while Gujarat burned. The National Human Rights Commission concluded that “there was a comprehensive failure on the part of the state government to control the persistent violation of the rights to life . . . and dignity of the people of the state”. The bloodstained buck stopped with the BJP chief minister.

Modi has never apologised for the violence, nor has he expressed remorse. On the contrary, he explained away the killings as springing from “the natural and justified anger of the people”; dismissed relief camps for displaced Muslims as “baby-making factories”; and (I kid you not) compared his own sadness over the massacres with that of a driver who runs over a puppy.

A Modi-led India won’t be safe for the country’s 176 million Muslims – or 25 million Christians. Since the election campaign began, one of his hard-right allies has said the chief minister’s opponents would have to leave India and move to Pakistan once he was elected PM. Another suggested that Muslims could be prevented from buying property in Hindu-dominated areas.

Yet David Cameron’s government has been reaching out to Modi, the leader of one of India’s most business-friendly states. In October 2012, the UK lifted its travel ban on Modi and our high commissioner in India held his first meeting with the chief minister – even though three British citizens were murdered in the Gujarat violence.

It isn’t just members of the Conservative-led coalition rushing to embrace the darling of the Hindu nationalist right. In August 2013, Barry Gardiner, the shadow environment minister, invited Modi to visit parliament in his own capacity as chair of Labour Friends of India – or what Bhatt refers to as “Labour Friends of the RSS”. Disgracefully, Gardiner has praised Modi as “a hugely important figure”, defended his role in the 2002 killings and, in a contemptible attempt to minimise the awfulness of the events, compared them to the London riots of 2011.

As someone of Indian origin, I’m ashamed that the homeland of my parents is on the verge of making an authoritarian populist, with Muslim blood on his hands, the next head of government. Remember: India is a secular democracy where many Muslims have thrived. The current vice-president and foreign minister are both Muslims.

As a British citizen, I am also ashamed that my government is willing to cosy up to standard-bearers of religious fascism – as long, it seems, as they aren’t Muslim. The realpolitik excuse will not wash. “While the UK and European governments are obliged to engage with other heads of government,” Bhatt says, “there is considerable political and diplomatic flexibility how that engagement takes place.”

David had taken the same tablets for years. Why the sudden side effects?

David had been getting bouts of faintness and dizziness for the past week. He said it was exactly like the turns he used to get before he’d had his pacemaker inserted. A malfunctioning pacemaker didn’t sound too good, so I told him I’d pop in at lunchtime.

Everything was in good order. He was recovering from a nasty cough, though, so I wondered aloud if, at the age of 82, he might just be feeling weak from having fought that off. I suggested he let me know if things didn’t settle.

I imagined he would give it a week or two, but the following day there was another visit request. Apparently he’d had a further turn that morning. The carer hadn’t liked the look of him so she’d rung the surgery.

Once again, he was back to normal by the time I got there. I quizzed him further. The symptoms came on when he got up from the sofa, or if bending down for something, suggesting his blood pressure might be falling with the change in posture. I checked the medication listed in his notes: eight different drugs, at least two of which could cause that problem. But David had been taking the same tablets for years; why would he suddenly develop side effects now?

I thought I’d better establish if his blood pressure was dropping. I got him to stand, and measured it repeatedly over a period of several minutes. Not a hint of a fall. And nor did he now feel in the slightest bit unwell. I was stumped. David’s wife had been watching proceedings from her armchair. “Mind you,” she said, “it only happens mid-morning.”

The specific timing made me pause. I asked to see his tablets. David passed me a carrier bag of boxes. I went through them methodically, cross-referencing each one to his notes.

“Well, there’s your trouble,” I said, holding out a couple of the packets. One was emblazoned with the name “Diffundox”, the other “Prosurin”. “They’re actually the same thing.”

Every medication has two names, a brand name and a generic one – both Diffundox and Prosurin are brand names of a medication known generically as tamsulosin, which improves weak urinary flow in men with enlarged prostates. Doctors are encouraged to prescribe generically in almost all circumstances – if I put “tamsulosin” on a prescription, the pharmacist can supply the best value generic available at that time, but if I specify a brand name they’re obliged to dispense that particular one irrespective of cost.

Generic prescribing is good for the NHS drug budget, but it can be horribly confusing for patients. Long-term medication keeps changing its appearance – round white tablets one month, red ovals the next, with different packaging to boot. And while the box always has the generic name on it somewhere, it’s much less prominent than the brand name. With so many patients on multiple medications, all of which are subject to chopping and changing between generics, it’s no wonder mix-ups occur. Couple that with doctors forever stopping and starting drugs and adjusting doses, and you start to get some inkling of quite how much potential there is for error.

I said to David that, at some point the previous week, two different brands of tamsulosin must have found their way into his bag. They looked for all the world like different medications to him, with the result that he was inadvertently taking a double dose every morning. The postural drops in his blood pressure were making him distinctly unwell, but were wearing off after a few hours.

Even though I tried to explain things clearly, David looked baffled that I, an apparently sane and rational being, seemed to be suggesting that two self-evidently different tablets were somehow the same. The arcane world of drug pricing and generic substitution was clearly not something he had much interest in exploring. So, I pocketed one of the aberrant packets of pills, returned the rest, and told him he would feel much better the next day. I’m glad to say he did.